Friday, July 27, 2012

If you missed out on this year's KScope conference, you missed out on a tremendous amount of APEX content. You missed the APEX 4.2 preview and discussions from Oracle. You missed great sessions on the APEX Listener, jQuery, Dynamic Actions, etc. You missed the opportunity to actually meet some of the best APEX experts on the planet.

Fear not! APEXposed has you covered!

APEXposed is a 2-day conference focused exclusively on APEX technical sessions. A subset of the presenters from KScope will be presenting their sessions again in Montreal, Quebec this September 11th & 12th at the Centre Mont Royal. And the best part? You can attend this 2-day conference for as little as $350! That's less than $30 per session!

If you register by August 15th and use the discount code ENKITEC, you'll get the $350 price. If you wait too long, the standard conference rate of $450 will apply, but the discount code will still be good.

Saturday, July 07, 2012

APEX pie charts allow you to limit the number of records that are displayed in the chart. This can be controlled by editing the Series and setting the Maximum Rows parameter. However, APEX will automatically add an "Other" slice to your chart, which represents all of the other data from the query.
Consider this example: you have 10 different widget types, and 10 of each type for a total of 100 units.
Here's some SQL to quickly create this scenario, if you want to follow along:

If you wanted to sum them based on type and just see the first five types, you can use a simple SQL statement like this:

SELECT
NULL link,
widget_type label,
COUNT(*) value
FROM
widgets
GROUP BY
widget_type
ORDER BY 2

Which will in turn, produce a chart that looks like this:
Clearly, not what you may expected, as you only wanted to see the top 5 widgets, not the top 5 plus all additional records grouped into an "other" slice. Visually, this may be misleading to the user.
To get just the top 5 records, we have to use an inline SQL statement that will select from our original SQL statement and limit the results to just 5 records:

With this approach, we let APEX create the chart and append the Other slice to the results. We then siphon off just the first five records, which in this case, will not include the Other slice. The result is something closer to what many users would expect:
Using this approach, the value of the Maximum Rows can be set anything greater than or equal to the value compared to ROWNUM in the last line of the second SQL statement, as we will be using the WHERE clause to limit how many records are displayed.